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When one woman’s glass of wine turns to three or four

“How much alcohol do you drink in a week?” my doctor asks during my physical. “Exactly four ounces a day,” I reply quickly. Not an outrageous lie but not the truth, either. Just one very full glass of wine — usually red — at the end of a day is what I require to feel like I’m living a life instead of hamstering on a wheel. I savour that glass.

Ann Dowsett Johnston and columnist Judith Timson are good friends who often chatted on the phone over their evening glasses of wine.

Ann Dowsett Johnston's book details her own journey.

In it, Dowsett Johnston, the child of a family in which she says, “addiction is a river that runs right through it,” also bravely offers up the details of her own drinking problem and recovery. Ann is a very close friend — she thanks me in the acknowledgments for being a “constant companion” throughout.

Except I wasn’t. I actually missed the part where my friend began getting into trouble with alcohol. She was pretty secretive. Besides, I thought we were in this together — busy working mothers needing that glass of wine to make, as she writes, the transition from office to home, from leaning in to kicking back, fuzzifying the hard edges of a life that many of us decided demanded perfection instead of merely doing our best.

Her description of a woman drinking alone at her kitchen counter is the best I’ve read, instantly recognizable to most women and precisely the opposite of any sordid addiction scenario: “Racing in from a long day at the office, an evening of cooking and homework ahead: the first instinct is to go to the fridge or the cupboard and pop a cork, soothing the transition from day to night with a glass of white or red. Chopping, dicing, sipping: it’s a common modern ritual.”

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Ann was one of the friends who called me in the decompression hour and we’d have that glass together, yakking about work, kids, relationships. Everything felt better with that first sip — the mistakes, the evasions, the difficulties of keeping the balls in the air.

But now in this hauntingly written book, my friend admits she didn’t stop at one but went on to three and more. She writes that alcohol has become “the modern woman’s steroid.” Ouch. Feminists may push back (especially those who like a little Pinot with their equality.) But I think she gets it right. Women are working harder and drinking harder. “I know at least three women who are incipient alcoholics,” says another close friend. In some book clubs, the chatter isn’t about the bestseller, but about who’s guzzling too much wine.

When she wrote and published her Atkinson Fellowship series on women and alcohol in 2011, Dowsett Johnston withheld her personal story. Instead she told a convincing factual tale: women are catching up to men in the drinking department, fuelled by an industry that, taking its cues from big tobacco when it lured women with “you’ve come a long way baby,” has “pinked” the market with sweet alcopops and Skinny Girl wine and other chick friendly imbibements.

Back then, newly sober, she feared the stigma of telling the world she had a problem. And then suddenly she didn’t fear it anymore, and wrote her heart out — about her parents’ addiction, about how her own drinking strained her love life, her relationship with her son, and her work.

It takes guts to admit all this, but that’s nothing compared to the guts it takes to quit drinking. My friend is nearly five years sober now, and while the first few years were rough — damn, I thought, no more sharing over that glass of wine — our friendship is richer than ever in conversation and laughs, revelations and good times.

Ann has taught me about vigilance: I am amazed at how awash we are in alcohol, how easy it is to just keep drinking. At a dinner, my host gestures toward me with the bottle, I cover my glass, she waits until I remove my hand and merrily splashes in a few more ounces. People shouldn’t do that. Women also shouldn’t fall for the patronizing Mommy’s Night Out crap at liquor stories as glamorous as the Titanic. If you’re going to drink, at least be an adult about it.

Dowsett Johnston is not asking women to give up drinking, but to drink with awareness, with prudence, knowing there’s a link between breast cancer and alcohol, and with humility. Don’t assume a drinking problem can’t happen to you.

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Addiction happens to relatively few people. Bad genes, bad living, bad luck. When she realized she had a problem, she couldn’t quit. “I totally underestimated my opponent,” she says. It took rehab, the support of family and friends, and a decision she now has to make every day for the rest of her life, that drinking is not for her.

It’s a wonderful book written by a woman who could be your best friend.

Judith Timson writes weekly about cultural, social and political issues. You can reach her at judith.timson@sympatico.ca and follow her on Twitter @judithtimson

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